10 Great Freak Matches: Part 1

Here’s something wonderful about disavowing any responsibility to
your fellow man: You can throw any two people in a ring, instruct
them to smack each other in the head until one falls down and then
count the gate receipts. (Toughman’s Art Dore -- your patron
saint.)

There are several things to enjoy about the country of Japan -- the
food, the pursuit of technological advances, seizure-inducing
metropolitan designs -- but uniformly competitive prizefighting is
not one of them. For every card like last weekend’s Sengoku 8,
there will be a companion event enlisting morbidly obese sumo,
ill-prepared actors or -- and may God not make a collective
judgment on all humanity -- Jose Canseco.

Not that we’re necessarily any more evolved. Fox gave us multiple
installments of “Celebrity Boxing.” But when we subject Todd
Bridges to a beating, at least we make him wear headgear.

No such luck in Japan. Ten matches that any athletic commission
would’ve projectile-vomited up:

A proud tradition in Japan, sumo is nonetheless the only major
sport that requires its athletes be morbidly obese. Good work if
you can get it.

Any other career that mandates a degree of mobility, though, is
going to be a big problem. And while the nightmare of a 600-pound
Chad Rowan in mount is nothing to sneeze at -- your lungs would be
too compressed, for one thing -- he’s still a stationary target,
easily manipulated by the skilled grappling of Royce Gracie.

Question his work ethic or his off-hours habit of waking up in
jail, but Charles Bennett is an athlete. And while his style is
often very pregnable, when he connects, he can really ruin your
day. Ask Karl James
Noons, former EliteXC lightweight champion and accomplished
striker, whom Bennett knocked cold.

Kaneko is a Japanese film and television actor. For reasons that
almost certainly involved a substantial amount of money, he agreed
to fight Bennett, then a veteran of 27 bouts. Bennett, displaying
compassion either organic or advised, submitted him with an armbar
instead of making his brain bleed.

Kaneko might be Japan’s version of Mickey Rourke, taking a
sabbatical from acting to try his hand in a field that really
didn’t require his participation. He lost his next two fights, then
returned to performing.

Choi, who recently made headlines for a proposed bout with Canseco
on May 26, is over seven feet tall; Kanennorsing is
five-foot-eleven and weighs roughly half of Choi’s 328 pounds.

In Japan, this is the kind of tape tale that makes a match a
foregone conclusion.

Kaennorsing circled Choi for four rounds of kickboxing, craning his
neck to look at Choi’s untouchable head. “Going high” meant
Kaennorsing would aim for the ribs, though he did get some altitude
on one high kick that landed on Choi’s jaw. This made the big man
chuckle. Choi went on to win a decision.

Kanennorsing is an endless resource of ring courage. Despite his
small stature, he’s defeated the enormous “Mighty” Mo and went the
distance with professional boxer Francois
Botha. This is still possibly the most absurd thing I’ve ever
seen.

Somehow, someone forgot to call Eric Esch and tell him to report
for duty as a James Bond henchman. Over 400 pounds, bald and stout,
he looks as if he should be trailing Roger Moore in an underground
lair before getting tipped into a pool of sharks.

But the call didn’t come. So Esch went into boxing, first as a
ringer for a series of club fights against sloppy,
haymaker-obsessed goons and then in four-round professional bouts.
Heavy hands and malformed looks go a long way in Japan, and soon
Esch was enlisted for an MMA match against lightweight Genki
Sudo.

Of course he was.

Sudo danced for a round before snaring Esch’s cankle in a heel
hook. There’s some small measure of satisfaction in watching a good
little guy beat a no-necked ox, but the fact that organizers
accepted the possibility Sudo could’ve gotten his head knocked off
is kind of chilling.

Professional wrestlers -- particularly those with legitimate
athletic credentials that don’t involve getting a staple gun to the
crotch -- are pursuing MMA with increasing frequency; chalk it up
to a desire to compete, a less hectic schedule and an influx of
cash.

In 1996, though, few stateside wrestlers would’ve considered
getting cranked in a shoot fight and risking their reputations for
minimal payoff. “Bam Bam” Bigelow was the exception. For a kid
growing up on a diet of WWF histrionics, he represented an early
cross-pollination between sports entertainment and full
contact.

It was not nature’s greatest idea. Bigelow took on a familiar UFC
face in Hawaiian bruiser Kimo and proceeded to get pummeled from
the mount -- a bare-fist buffet -- for an uncomfortably long time
before submitting to a rear-naked choke.

While Bigelow was undoubtedly a tough guy, his fighting skill set
-- even for an era as primitive as the mid-’90s -- was skeletal at
best. Athletes who appear on ice cream sandwich bars are not
necessarily the most equipped for the cage.